


the oceans have me now

by tinydragon (tiny_dragon)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Mermaids, percabeth is v brief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 20:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11238372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_dragon/pseuds/tinydragon
Summary: in which annabeth spends a lot of time hanging around the pier and one day, she meets a mermaid.





	the oceans have me now

**Author's Note:**

> I have never written pipabeth before! Pls bear with me!

The first time Annabeth meets the mermaid, she is twelve, angrily throwing rocks against the sharp surface of the water.

She’s short, frizzy-blonde hair sticking up all over the place, bleached even brighter by the summer sun. And she’s extremely pissed off with her best friend.

It’s something stupid – futile – she’ll forget about it in a couple of hours when he turns up at her door pleadingly. Truthfully, she’ll forget it as soon as she spots the pretty girl, watching her from the rocks sticking out of the sea a few metres away from the pier.

“You  _ suck _ , Percy Jackson,” she mutters, under her breath. There’s no one around – a blessing this time of year. But it’s getting late, she supposes. The sun bleaching the blue sky in shades of orange and deep pinks, making the ocean roof glitter.

It’ll get dark soon. And cold. But Annabeth doesn’t want to go home.

Home, like Percy Jackson, really tends to suck at the moment.

But it’s when she’s murmuring curses that Percy Jackson will never actually hear that a voice interrupts her steady stream of thought, and Annabeth catches sight of her.

“I don’t think he can hear you,” her voice is feather-light, sing-song-like. Annabeth looks up quickly and urgently and scans around the docking area, but there’s no one. It’s a ghost town. And then she brings her gaze before her. And the girl is moving closer, in time with the soft splash of the waves she brings as she swims.

“They don’t recommend swimming here without a lifeguard,” Annabeth warns her.

The girl gives her a smile. She’s stopped swimming now, a few inches away from the edge of the pier.

“Thanks for the tip,” she says. “But I think I’ll be alright.”

Annabeth scowls, because the obnoxiousness reminds her of Percy, who’d had this exact attitude last summer before he’d whacked his head on the wood and almost drowned. And Annabeth had had to get her clothes wet diving in after him. And they’d both been grounded for a week.

“Yeah, well,” Annabeth mutters. She turns, prepared to walk away and go home and mope in her room for a bit, before falling into drawing and other worlds and drawing other worlds to take her mind off of it. “It’s your funeral.”

“Wait, no, I’m sorry,” the girl says. “I didn’t mean to annoy you.”

Annabeth hesitates. Feels a little guilty because she’s being cold and this weird girl in the sea is just trying to be nice.

“It’s okay, you didn’t. I’m just annoyed.”

“How come?” the girl asks. Her face is all curiosity. Mouth curved up in sympathy. Big moon eyes and she looks ready to listen.

Annabeth is definitely ready to rant.

“It’s a long story.”

The water girl grins. “I’ve got time.”

Annabeth thought she’d had more than enough of strange, pretty-faced friends who have big mouths and half live in the sea.

Annabeth thought wrong.

::

Annabeth thought very wrong. Because this strange, pretty-faced friend definitely has a big mouth, but she doesn’t half live in the sea. She full lives in the sea: breathes and becomes the ocean. A scaly tale the colour of sunsets, bright oranges and reds and pinks smudging into each other, shining beneath the film-like surface of the ocean.

“Don’t scream,” Piper – that’s her name, Piper – had said, warningly, before she’d broken all of the rules in Annabeth’s black-and-white world.

Annabeth didn’t scream. But the world was backflipping and breaking and turning into something new and golden as she’d stared.

::

Annabeth takes to spending the rest of the summer evenings out at the pier. This is much to the chagrin of Percy, and although they’ve made up and he’s her best friend in the world and she loves him, she can’t bring herself to create any distance between her and Piper.

But she can’t bring herself to share Piper, either.

The summer comes to a slow end. September isn’t that much colder but the beautiful girl who lives in the ocean is gone without saying goodbye, and so everything feels a lot icier than it actually is.

::

The next summer, Annabeth’s dad and step-mother have enough and send her half way across the country to go to camp.

She comes home a few days before the holidays end. She doesn’t bother going to the pier to look for Piper. She’s never been good at letting go of grudges.

For the next two summers, she stays home but no matter how many times Percy tries to drag her down to the sea, she refuses.

::

The next time Annabeth sees the mermaid she is fifteen and she is dating Percy Jackson.

Everything is weird and strange and she likes it but she doesn’t. She likes being close to Percy but she doesn’t know if she wants to kiss him. She loves him more than anyone else in the world and so it doesn’t make sense that she doesn’t want to be alone with him anymore.

After blowing him off for the third day in a row, and unable to spend another day cooped up in the house – stupid stepmom and stupid brothers and stupid family – she makes her way down to the best sunset spot in town.

The pier. Where she can clear her head. Where she can finally breathe.

By the time she makes it there the sun is already half-way to setting. She’s missed the best parts and pretty soon it’ll be getting cold, and she’s forgotten a jacket. She sits down, arms around her knees, all bruised and cut-up from forest adventures and climbing trees because she and Percy haven’t quite grown up, not yet.

Except from when they try to be.

And she hugs herself tightly and closes her eyes and tries to think her way out of what she’s feeling.

“Hey,” a voice says and it’s been three years but Annabeth’s head is up, snap-your-neck quick and she’s glaring.

“ _ You _ ,” she says, though it comes out more like a bit of a spit, and a lot more accusatory than intended.

Piper smiles sheepishly. Like this isn’t anything she wouldn’t expect.

“Me,” she agrees. “Hi, Annabeth. Long time no see.”

“And who’s fault is that?”

“A little bit of mine,” Piper admits. But then she frowns. “You weren’t here though, last summer. Or the time before that or even – you’ve not been here for ages. I came back. I checked.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did,” Piper sounds a little upset by Annabeth’s skepticism. But surely she understands that if a friend leaves you once, you don’t really expect them not to do so again and again and again?

“But you left first,” Annabeth reminds her. Voice quivers a little bit.

_ I am not weak _ , she tells herself. She hears the tinny voice of Piper responding inside of her head, saying,  _ feeling things doesn’t make you weak _ .

She makes a mental note to ask Piper if she can read minds and telepathically communicate. Only, you know, not when they’re mid dramatic re-introduction after three years of radio silence.

“I didn’t know,” Piper says quietly. “I was a kid too. Nobody told me we’d be leaving in the morning. We travel around the seas. We only come by this area every so often, once a year, when it’s the warmest and the prettiest. My dad likes it. Reminds him of my mom.”

She says this all very quickly.

Annabeth takes the moments wherein Piper is talking very quickly to survey the old but still familiar face. Her dark skin and perpetually wet hair hanging around her shoulders and big, earnest eyes.

Can’t help but focus on her lips. Slightly red underneath the dying light.

“Oh,” Annabeth says, eventually. “I didn’t think of it like that.”

“What did you think of it like?”

“I don’t know. Like you’d just got bored and decided to piss off somewhere cooler. You have the whole ocean, don’t you?”

“You have the whole earth, don’t you?” Piper quips back and Annabeth can’t help but smile although she tries to hide it with a scoff. “Anyway,” she continues. “I wouldn’t just up and leave. I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”

“Yeah?” Annabeth asks. Raises one eyebrow.

Allows one leg to be cautiously dipped over the side of the pier, so that her bare foot just touches the cool splash of water.

“Prove it. Don’t leave without saying goodbye this time.”

And Piper grins.

“It’s a promise.”

::

One evening, way after curfew as the summer comes to a close, Annabeth lies with her head against the pier and looks up at the stars. Piper, next to her, lies on the surface of the water, floating upwards and gazing up and letting the moonlight wash down over her body.

_ Beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful,  _ these, among others, are some of Annabeth’s thoughts that night.

It’s getting cold but she feels so warm.

Her phone is off and she’s not done anything to feel bad about, so why does she feel so guilty about not getting round to texting Percy back?

“Hey, Piper,” she says, jogging herself out of her thoughts and back into the real world.

But the real world seems so make believe when she’s lying underneath starlight, on an ink-bleached evening where everything is a daydream and a mermaid is beside her, breathing gently against the waves of water that lap against her skin.

“Yeah?” Piper’s voice is sleepy.

Annabeth knows, through detailed discussion of what it’s like to be a mermaid, and what, in turn, it is like to be a human, that mermaids do sleep. They sleep underwater, usually from the hours after sunrise until the early evening. Pre-sunset.

This is to avoid fishermen.

Since meeting Piper, Annabeth has had a more violent than usual reaction to her step-mother making any type of seafood casserole. Not that she ever liked it to begin with.

Annabeth clears her throat.

_ Stop thinking. _

_ But gods above you’re gorgeous _ .

“Mermaids can’t, you know, read minds, can they?” she asks.

::

Piper keeps her promise.

She says goodbye this time.

When it isn’t the summer sunset and there aren’t mermaids hanging around the ocean, the pier becomes Annabeth’s least favourite location in the entire city.

::

She and Percy break up. They go back to being best friends, and the world goes back to rotating tin the correct direction.

When she tells him, a few months later, that she maybe, just a little bit, potentially likes girls and only girls, Percy looks at her for a few moments and then shrugs.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s cool.” He pauses. They’re sixteen, in the midst of high school. He grins. “Wanna go climb trees?”

They go and climb trees.

::

On the first day of June, the very next summer, Annabeth waits at the edge of the pier for a magical girl who she loves with her whole heart. She waits to kiss her underneath the milky moonlight, to hold her hand even though it’s cold and clammy, feels dead as a fish.

She loves Piper, she’s pretty sure. So she’ll hold hands with ocean girls whose touch feels like dead things.

Honestly, despite her lesbianism and the train wreck that was their relationship, even having Percy Jackson for a boyfriend felt easier than this.

So Annabeth waits until it’s dark and when Piper doesn’t come, she goes home. Comes back the next day, before sunset. She repeats this sequence for the whole summer, at least, until late July when she gives up.

And when Percy asks why she looks so sad she says, “I’m just all stressed about college,” because she doesn’t particularly want to go, and she doesn’t want to be alone but there’s nothing for her in this town.

Percy doesn’t believe her but he never pushes.

For that whole summer, Piper never comes.

::

As they get a little older Annabeth’s fears about college become a reality. Percy gets a swim-team scholarship and he’s going a thousand miles away.

Annabeth supposes her only escape is college, too. It’s what everyone has always expected. But while Annabeth loves to learn, loves wisdom and knowledge, she doesn’t think she particularly likes education. She’s always struggled in school and the things that she wants to know aren’t what can be put down on paper.

She wants to see how things happen, not know how they are described by a paper and a pen. She wants to know the why and not just the what, and she wants to watch it all, not theorise from a book. And while sometimes that was okay and she knows it’s enough for some, that Percy will have the time of his life studying marine biology, it’s not what she wants.

But this town chokes her. The water threatens to rise up from the ocean and drown them all and Annabeth will be the first victim of the unruly witch that they know as the sea.

It’s safe to say that she feels a little lost.

::

Annabeth is eighteen when she finally, finally, meets the mermaid, one last time.

It’s the middle of the night. Summer is burning and there are stars in the sky and she doesn’t feel cold at all. And they were partying over at the Stoll brothers’ house, but she’s stone cold sober.

Tomorrow morning, Percy leaves for college, and she’ll be alone.

She never bothered sending off an application.

So she sits at the pier. She’s not expecting much, because for the past two summers, Piper has not returned and she’s given up waiting. She won’t pretend to be some helpless princess, waiting on a tower top for some beautiful girl who isn’t going to come back.

But here’s the thing: she does come back.

A splash of silver, something magic glimmering at the bottom of the ocean. A tail thrashing through the stillness of the night. Annabeth’s eyes are closed, her ears still thumping from the party and the loud music that can still be heard a few blocks away. Still a little teary from saying goodbyes, from hugging her best friend so tight she thought they both might die.

She doesn’t look up.

She listens to the waves and she doesn’t dare to hope.

But there’s this voice, melodic and soft and oceanic in itself, that calls to her, that brings her back from the dreamland she’s lapsing into, and back into reality.

A weird reality, where strange half-fish friends smile sheepishly from the ocean. Half of her body is human and half of it is the colour of the sunset, glowing oddly underneath the light of the moon.

Annabeth’s reality is, quite frankly, a fucking weird one.

“Hi,” Piper says.

Annabeth blinks.

She sits up, slowly.

And then, without thinking, she picks up her shoe (from where it’s been sat next to her as her toes dipped into the cool water) and flings it into the sea. Not anywhere near enough to hit Piper, but enough to splash her with droplets of water.

“Um,” Piper says. “Can I take that as you saying hi back?”

“You can take it,” Annabeth snaps. “As me saying a giant  _ fuck you _ in mermaid speak.”

“I speak English,” Piper reminds her.

“Well, have it in two languages then.”

“Annabeth, listen,” Piper swims forwards, clammy hands reaching out to grip the wooden edge of the pier. “I’m sorry. I wanted to come back.”

“I’m getting really sick of you leaving, you know that?” Annabeth’s voice is bitter and she’s not looking at Piper. She’s looking out at the sea and the moonlight horizon and the miles and miles of black, blank ocean.

Not so black and blank because underneath the gentle waves are monsters and weird fish and fungus and beautiful mermaid girls who have been breaking Annabeth’s heart since she was twelve years old.

“I know,” Piper tells her. Voice pleading. “Would you believe me if I told you I was getting sick of me leaving, too?”

“Then why do you keep doing it?”

“Because I’m – I  _ was _ a kid. I had to stay with my family. I couldn’t leave them and believe me, it sucked and when I found out we weren’t coming by here anymore… believe me, it broke my heart and I wanted to swim away but I just couldn’t…”

“You could have,” Annabeth tells her.

Her voice is small now. A shadow in a dark room. Something soft.

“I couldn’t,” Piper shakes her head. “But I’m here now. I left my family. I turned eighteen and I left them, and I came back for you.”

Annabeth gapes at her.

Piper is looking earnest. Face bright and shining underneath the sky light.

She’s every bit as beautiful as she was when they first met.

“You left your family?”

“I’ll find them again,” Piper says, but she doesn’t sound sure. “I had to come back for you, though. I couldn’t just. Stay away forever. It wasn’t fair and you’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and it’s really crazy because you’re not like me. You’re literally from another world.”

“Tell me about it,” Annabeth mutters.

There is so much about Piper’s world she doesn’t know about.

How exactly do mermaids breathe, sleep and speak underneath the ocean?

“But I had to come back,” Piper finishes, as if she hasn’t heard a thing. Breathless. “I had to come back for you. I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t…”

“Thank you,” Annabeth tells her. She feels awkward, suddenly, stilted and shy. Her voice cracks. “I missed you.”

“I missed  _ you _ ,” Piper tells her.

Tentatively, Annabeth slides her hands across the cool, rough surface of the pier walk-way. Her hands find Piper’s, and she tangles them together.

Piper’s fingers feel cold, dead, alien. Something from another world.

And they fit Annabeth’s perfectly.

They are quiet for a moment, like counting each other’s heart beats in the quiet. And then Annabeth moves forward, still seated, until she’s right on the edge of the pier, her hands dropping Piper’s. And then, fully-clothed, she lowers herself down, into the sea.

It’s cold. The chill of it jars her, sends goosebumps bursting up and down her arms and legs. Her clothes cling uncomfortably to her body.

But she’s closer to Piper than she ever has been before.

And when Piper takes her hands once again – no longer strange, no longer uncomfortable at the touch, like they’re from the same world now – she feels safe above the water.

“I love you,” Annabeth has never said this before. The words feel like giants.

But Piper reacts as if they are mice. “I know,” she says. She smiles. “I love you too.”

The ocean rolls against them, sends shocks of cold up and down Annabeth’s spine and skin. But when Piper presses her lips – as cold, as wet as they are – against Annabeth’s own, all she can feel is warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Please leave me feedback so that I can improve my writing, and hmu on tumblr at willsolaced for any prompts or shenanigans or general feedback sorta things. comments make me cry and also love u infinitely


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